


Alien Roadtrip!

by HelloAmHere



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: American weirdness, Cacti - Freeform, Comfort, Explicit Sexual Content, Loneliness, M/M, Roadtrip, Scientist Louis, Snacks & Snack Food, Supernatural Elements, dangerous levels of Tom Petty exposure, equal apologies owed to biologists and people who live in Nevada and people who like slim jims, feelings about science, oh I guess I should also say bisexual!Louis, wistfulness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-08
Updated: 2018-04-08
Packaged: 2019-04-20 06:24:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14254902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HelloAmHere/pseuds/HelloAmHere
Summary: For the first time in his life, Louis doesn’t know where he’s going. Harry doesn’t mind.OR: roadtrip with desert feelings, too much snack food, and empty motels. Harry is definitely absolutely not an alien. That would be ridiculous.





	Alien Roadtrip!

**Author's Note:**

> Unbetaed, a loving mess, which is also something you could say about my head.  
> There is so much big life decision stress you guys and I wanted to write. I have no excuse for this.
> 
>  
> 
> [my fic tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/helloamhere)

He’s just another figure in the desert landscape. There’s no reason at all Louis should notice him at the gas station. 

Then again he stands out, especially since there are only a few of them. All men, but not the kind of men that Louis usually lets his eyes linger on. There are a couple of tired-looking guys with an incongruous boat behind a huge truck, there’s a teenager at the register guarding the key to the bathroom, there’s one old man sitting on the curb smoking. And there’s Louis, feeling out of place even on this island of the out of place. 

Maybe the difference is that everyone else temporarily stopped here seems to have some kind of goal.  Even the old man shuffles his cigarette pack like he's grimly determined to finish it before leaving. Louis doesn't have a goal. He has to get gas, but that's not so much a goal as it is habit. 

This guy, though.

Unlike the rest of them, he’s noticeable. He’s got a wide-brimmed hat over thick hair that’s long and curled and rather feminine but it works, and the guy’s so fucking attractive it wouldn't matter if it didn't. He’s a tall body with a long torso in skinny jeans, strong arms coming out of a thin tank top that's flapping in the sandy wind. The world this far from the center of the map is rough, dry and acrid. Louis has got grit through the sides of his beat-up converse, has got chapped lips again, just from standing outside of his car long enough to fill up. Maybe that’s why this guy’s face has captured his attention, because it’s happy and soft and unbothered, it’s such an open contrast. 

He's got a flower in his hat. He’s got a hitchhiker’s backpack and a hitchhiker’s sign. It reads: _Let’s Go!!_

Like that, two exclamation points. Why? Wasn’t one enough? There’s a smiley face on the sign, which Louis thinks would be ominous on literally anybody else’s sign. The guy doesn’t have a hitchhiker’s predatory stare, though. For all the good looks, the muscles and the height, he looks like a puppy. Or your sister’s third boyfriend, once she wises up enough to get a good one. Or the eccentric one in your college friend group, a guy you never get to know that well but one time, you stay up all night talking about stuff you can't even really remember in the morning. Weird stuff, like toothpaste flavors.

Maybe that face is why Louis doesn’t dive back into his car when the guy comes over. Fast enough to qualify as hurrying. 

“Greetings, I'm Harry,” the guy says. 

“Your smile is falling off,” Louis says. Harry puts two fingers up to his own cheek with mild concern. 

“Nah,” he says, smiling bigger, “They're just dimples. I can understand the confusion.” 

Louis stares at him. He's grinning huge, like seeing Louis is an utter delight, like Harry The Hitchhiker and Louis go way back. Harry is a nutcase, and Louis is a rational human who doesn't talk to hitchhikers, ever. 

“I mean your sign,” Louis points to it. Up close he can see the smiley face is made of glitter glue and it's coming off in the heat, sliding down the cardboard in a silver blob of speckles with a cloudy trail, like a cheap craft meteor storm. The face used to have two glitter antennae, or ears? It's too melted to tell. 

“Ah, thank you. I knew you'd be thoughtful, I saw it in your eyes,” Harry says. His voice is slow and deep and makes Louis feel peacefully excited. That's not a common combination and Louis suddenly wants more of it like he wants a cold red slushie from the gas station in this heat, wants the feeling to ooze down between his ribs and melt in the pit of his stomach despite the burning sun on his bare head. It aches like the throb of a brain freeze. 

“But it's all right, I won't need it anymore. What's your name?” Harry prompts. 

Louis’ gas clicks done, and he uses that cue to swivel away from Harry. He should dismiss him entirely, but he can't help but smile back, fumbling with the gas cap. 

“It's Louis. Don't you need the sign to catch a ride?” 

“I've got my ride, but we can keep the sign since you like it,” Harry says.

Louis actually glances over his shoulder and around them before he realizes that Harry is still grinning, waiting patiently with his backpack over one shoulder and his nice jaw and his dimples. Louis has a habit of second guessing whether people are looking at him and they actually mean it, so he asks anyway.

“You mean me? You want a ride with me? You don't even know where I'm going.” 

He means to also say that there's no way in cactus-studded hell he's going to take a hitchhiker along with him. He's not a particularly brave person or a person who likes strangers or a person who knows, actually, where he's going right now. 

“Take me wherever you’re going,” Harry says, like it’s of no consequence. “Everything will be interesting.”

 

*** 

 

“Your flower, it's not native,” Louis says. Harry’s in his passenger seat and Louis can’t come up with an explanation for how that happened. The road is smooth and straight after a curving detour around some miniature buttes. Straight is a blessing since earlier in the day Louis had been getting carsick. Driving three days in a row will do that, even through the endless flat.

“You know that?” Harry asks.

“I know some things about plants,” Louis says. He doesn't know why he's being vague about it, except. Maybe it's because he's out here specifically to get away from the specificity of what he knows, to let a dull homogenous horizon fill his eyes instead of anything green. He's waiting for Harry to ask where in particular he's going and he's dreading the moment he's going to have to admit he doesn't really know. He plans to drop Harry off at another gas station before that. 

“Why do you like this song?” Harry asks. Half the stations are dead air but Louis found exactly one that works and it’s playing Tom Petty. 

“I don’t, it’s just what came on,” Louis says. 

“You’re tapping your finger,” Harry points out. “For you people moving in a synchronized rhythm with music is a sign of enjoyment!” 

He sounds a tiny bit put out, like Louis has violated some expectation. Louis glances at Harry out the corner of his eye. Harry’s still quite arresting, maybe more so when he looks put out. 

“' _You people'?”_ Louis asks. He consciously relaxes his palms around the steering wheel. Tapping, nonsense. 

“I'm not native either,” Harry says. Louis gives him a real look. Harry's face has switched to mischievous. He’s got a handkerchief tied around his neck with a loose knot. It has a print of tiny pink cowboy hats, twisting in flocks on blue denim. It looks like it was made for a twelve-year-old. A twelve-year-old _girl._

“I have a hypothesis that no matter where you are, no matter how far you are out of range of any normal stations, _Free Fallin’_ will always be playing on the radio,” Louis says. “Somewhere, it’ll be playing. You could be hitchhiking on the moon and you’d fiddle a dial and it would be all, _and I’m freeee…”_

Louis trails off, because the radio had faded a little and his voice had come out on the chorus a lot more clearly than he’d meant it too. Harry is grinning.  

“I don't particularly like it, it's just really familiar,” Louis says. 

“Ah, but you like things that are familiar, don't you,” Harry says. It feels philosophical. Louis steers around a pothole and tries to not feel threatened about hippie hitchhikers who are probably waiting to evangelize an intentionally rootless, no possessions, holier-than-thou lifestyle. 

“I don't know, I guess,” Louis says finally, a little too late and abrupt to be polite. Harry is unruffled. He points two fingers in the air and conducts the end of the song with small semi-circles.

Louis still wants a lemonade, or a slushie, something cool to pour down his throat at the next gas station. He wonders if Harry will be down for a stop for no reason other than Louis’ childish cravings or whether stopping means that Harry will toddle on to his next car ride, and he feels a sudden desire to not stop until he has to. It's just--nice to have someone to talk to. Which is crazy, having this supernaturally zen hitchhiking hippie in his car at all is completely crazy, and Louis isn’t a person who does crazy things. 

Present situation excepted, clearly. 

“The moon has great signal though,” Harry says. 

“How would you know? Are you an alien?” Louis snorts. 

“Whaaaat,” Harry says, with a huge exhale of air, “I’m not an alien. Aliens aren’t real. And if they were real, they’d all be in Area 61, in army barrack bunkbeds, looking forward to macaroni-and-cheese thursday, complaining about the shower pressure. Not waiting in gas stations for generous, altruistic boys like you, willing to drive us around.” 

“Area 51,” Louis says. Harry looks at him with those green eyes. Too green, Louis thinks. Everything about Harry is a little too….much. The way he sits in Louis’ passenger seat and puts his feet on the dash like he belongs there. The way he says the name of every tiny no-place town they’re passing despite saying he’s never been here before. The way he keeps saying he'll just go wherever Louis feels like going. The way his presence makes Louis nervous but not-nervous at the same time, challenging and comforting. Maybe that part is just Louis’ weirdness, not Harry's. Lord knows Louis has been accused of it before.

“What?” Harry asks. 

“Area 51, that’s where they keep the aliens,” Louis says. He must be lonelier than he thought, because Harry’s insanity is feeling more charming than anything. 

“Oh, did they move?” Harry asks, sounding surprised. 

 

 ***

 

Louis hadn't noticed a living thing for three days besides the obvious cacti. Driving here, he'd thought, might as well be driving through a skeleton on Mars. In the first hour, Harry points out five different birds, names three types of cacti, and spies at least a dozen mammals. It makes Louis feel the tiniest pang of guilt. He knows just a few common ones like saguaro and organ pipes, he knows cylindropuntia because he'd briefly had a girlfriend who'd loved them based on spring break climbing trips to Joshua Tree, but he doesn't really know anything about this ecosystem. 

Then again, there wouldn't have been any point in learning about it, given all of its sun. The desert had always been out there, neighboring his life for the past six years, just far enough to seem irrelevant. Three and a half days ago he took a look at the familiar sign on the Interstate that warned you to get gas wherever you could, if you kept going in this direction. And suddenly he was going in that direction.

Harry likes small furry Southwestern animals, and knows quite a lot about them. Harry likes a lot of things and tells Louis about it in nearly excruciating detail: desert mice that never pee, bookstores in small towns that used to be houses, Canadian military treaties, the way that old velvet seats feel when you're wearing shorts. 

It's undeniably odd but Louis enjoys it, Harry’s low voice and unbothered commentary. It's nice having something to listen to without the pressure of talking. 

Harry announces that it’s time to stop for snacks but doesn't say anything about getting off for a better and more directional ride, thanks anyway. Louis breathes a quiet sigh, something like relief. Harry smiles at him, bent over the radio and flipping the dial with one long finger. His fingernails are perfectly clean, suspiciously clean for a peripatetic hippie. Tom Petty belts out on three out of the five stations, sandwiched between static.

The gas station is miniscule. Louis would've missed it without Harry's pointing out the window. It has barely any food, mostly gum and a ring of stale pretzels revolving in a stained metal cabinet. Harry takes one look at a bin of beef jerky near the counter and dives headfirst into it.  

“Somebody's a fan,” says the girl behind the counter. Harry's entire upper body is vanished. The girl pops blue gum out the corner of her mouth, eyes wide. She looks anywhere from fourteen to twenty-five, features blurred in sandy wind. 

“Of so many things, apparently,” Louis says. He shakes his head. The girl's reading a college biology textbook, he's just lost his ability to tell their age anymore. There's a photosynthesis diagram on the page it's open to, dog-eared and highlighted. It's a text he recognizes but it's at least five editions out of date, and it was a bad textbook to begin with. 

“That's only in most plants, you know,” Louis says.

“What?” The girl asks without looking. She's still watching Harry's ass. How much difference could there be between packages of beef jerky? It's a good ass on long legs, though, Louis can't blame her.

“The chlorophyll thing, the caption says all plants, kind of a simplification. There are some plants that don't get energy from the sun, they're parasitic,” Louis says.

The girl pops gum again. She manages to inflect doubt in the pop. 

“Do you think it'll be on the test?” She asks. 

“Probably not,” Louis says. 

The girl squishes her face like she's saying, _then who cares._ There's nothing cold and icy to drink in this gas station. There isn't even air conditioning. Louis doesn't know how the girl survives it. Maybe she's just adapted to the desert now. Maybe she's like a desert mouse, absorbing moisture from the gum and condensation on the gas station walls in the morning and never peeing.

Harry buys an inhuman amount of jerky. There's paprika and garlic and citrus jerky, beef jerky and turkey jerky and fish jerky, even. When they get back in the car he hands some to Louis. It's disgusting. Louis gags and spits out the window without thinking, but Harry just laughs and laughs. Louis feels warmer than ever. Hopefully the next stop will have a slushie machine.

 

*** 

 

“So what was Area 51 like?” Louis asks. It's Christina Aguilera on the radio this time, early Xtina, bell-bottomed denim. Louis would venture the chorus if he were alone, thinks he has an ok falsetto in the shower. But he's not alone and he's kind of enjoying that while it lasts so he's got the radio turned to a low background murmur. The chorus still bops along in his head. 

“61,” Harry sniffs. “When you're special like I am, you go to 61.”

“My mistake,” Louis says, “I'm not an expert.”

“It was,” Harry hesitates, “It was quite ok for a while.” He has the tone of someone trying to be diplomatic.

“I like to try to help your scientists!” He says brightly. “But things did get a little...pokey.”  

“Uh huh,” Louis says. The alien gag is still stupidly funny to him but for some reason he also feels a little sad. In the movies it’s always all sterile warehouse walls and men in masks.

“Scientists aren't really like that,” he says. “You know, in real life?” 

“Everything is real somewhere in the multiverse,” Harry intones.

“That sounds like a religious script,” Louis laughs.

“It is!” Harry exclaims. “My people are big on many possible realities. We view reality as a multiverse which as you'd imagine has quite the profound impact on how this version of you might understand causality and choice. But what do you mean, scientists aren't like what?”  

Louis adjusts his grip on the steering wheel. Must be getting a little tired. Time to stop off and stretch at a gas station and hope Harry won’t buy something phenomenally weird again. Two hours ago when Louis finally had to pee, not being a desert mouse, Harry had bought cuttlefish chips. Why does a Sunoco in Nevada sell cuttlefish chips? They’re so far from the ocean. The road here looks flat but it has divots that send reflective sparks into Louis’ eyes, even through the sunglasses.

“Scientists aren't heartless sociopaths who dissect things,” he says forcefully. “Like in alien movies. Or like, we have very strict rules about animal models if we do. And we care.”  

Harry turns all the way around in his seatbelt.

“Are _you_ a scientist, Lou?” He sounds delighted. Louis finds he doesn't mind the nickname.

“Yeah, maybe,” he says. 

“Amazing!” Harry chirps. “You must be extremely valued here, huh? Earth would really miss you if you left.” 

He looks happy but also, maybe a tiny bit apprehensive, interrogating. Louis can't interpret it. Either way, Louis feels honorbound to set him right on the finer details of just how valued Louis actually is. 

“Err, I think you might have missed some of the nuance of how earth culture values knowledge, in your studies,” Louis says. Harry nods. Louis recognizes that polite nod of someone not-getting-it-but-pretending, from many a grad student.

“I probably make like, half as much as one of these truck drivers. Not that that’s not a very challenging and important occupation,” Louis adds, out of fairness. “But, you know. It’s tough these days.” 

It’s particularly tough at Louis’ small state school, which barely has funds for a computer lab, let alone to support the expensive equipment spaces that Louis needs. Louis holds back a sigh. 

“You’re a great deal nicer than the scientists at A-six-one,” Harry says.

“It was probably all military and whatever, yeah?” Louis says. 

Harry nods. Louis snorts.  

“ _Government_ scientists,” he says contemptuously, “That explains that.” 

“Did they poke you too?” Harry asks sympathetically. Louis yelps with laughter. He’s never actually heard himself make a noise like that before. Harry giggles, pleased, still twisted entirely around in his seatbelt. The sun makes his brown hair splash caramel, makes him squint. 

Louis should make him turn around because Harry is totally disregarding road safety and Louis feels responsible for the whole thing, the whole Harry situation, given that he’d picked him up and was driving them deeper and deeper into the desert. But it's really nice to have this gentle attention, reminds Louis strangely of the lab’s low-light LED lamps for the tropical plants. Harry's jaw has a faint trace of stubble on it and sometimes the sun catches it, brightens the fine hairs like they're needles on a cactus. 

“Nah, they didn’t poke me, not nearly enough poking in my life these days,” Louis says sarcastically, and then flushes a little, and carries on quickly. “The thing is I had a grant, you know, like a lot of money from the government to work on research projects. They pulled the plug on it.” 

“I’m sorry,” Harry says. Louis shrugs.

“They said the line of projects wasn’t applied enough, anymore,” Louis says. 

It still rankled. It isn't the point of science, is it? Not to make some weapon fuel source better or save some politician money, but to see things as they were. To get closer to the universe.

“People just don’t care about finding things out as much as they should,” Louis says. “Finding things out for the sake of….just for the sake of knowing. Exploring.” 

“No, they don’t,” Harry agrees. “Earth is better because you do.”  

Louis shrugs again, suddenly uncomfortable and wondering how a conversation that was so batshit had tricked him into revealing so many things about himself. And about what he was driving away from. 

“I’m glad you got out of their maniacal clutches,” he says. 

“It wasn’t hard,” Harry says, “I was only indulging them. I’m never stuck anywhere for long.” 

“That must be nice,” Louis says. That was kind of the dream. Tenure-track didn’t provide that kind of dream. 

“Yes,” Harry says. 

They drive on. The road, Louis thinks sleepily, is a little bit like a strange illusion. You keep seeing the horizon, but it never seems to get any closer. Maybe they’re driving in a golden-orange dusty circle, passing the same cacti and the same road signs and just forgetting. Maybe that’s why Harry feels so easy to talk to, because they’ve spent a lot more time together than he actually remembers. Maybe they're caught in a relativity loop, edging a secret desert gravity mass and losing their place on the usual track of linear time. Maybe Louis should’ve been a different kind of scientist, should have been an astrophysicist instead of a stupid biologist. He could be driving all over the southwest finding the darkest spot in the desert and sleeping on a thin camping pad with all the stars in the universe for a roof. Instead, he has too many years in closed, dark rooms fiddling with code and wires and on the phone, arguing for grants. And he'd moved too often and worked too late to have anyone to come home to, even if he'd felt like he had a home.

“Louuu,” Harry drawls. Apparently he’s found the nickname pleasing and committed to it. Louis feels his mouth try to kick up and sternly keeps it down. 

“What’s up?” he says. 

“I think you’re valuable. I think anybody would be lucky to pay you government money to explore and also poke you. If you wanted.” 

“Cool,” Louis says. “That is the weirdest, nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.” 

 

***

 

It’s halfway through the day when Louis realizes that Harry’s the type to really dig in and _commit_ to a bit, even a weird bit, like about being a tourist alien. 

“I speak extremely good American,” Harry says, sounding injured, after Louis can’t hold in his twitchy laughter at the weird way that he phrases things. “I do a passable Canadian, but my British is a little, what, bollocks?” 

“Those are all English,” Louis points out. They kept passing road signs that seemed like somebody trying to pick a name over and over. _Desert Flats. Flat Dunes. Panacama. Panacita. Desert Panic._ There haven’t been any other cars for the last two hours.

They’d stopped at another gas station to stretch their legs and Harry had climbed up on top of the car trunk and meditated for ten minutes while Louis wandered into the gas station. The attendant hadn’t been studying any biology, so he’d wandered back out and climbed up to sit next to Harry and feel a little insane, and a little overheated, but also kind of joyful, like a little kid.  

“Louis,” Harry says kindly, “You are an American, not English. Maybe no one's ever told you. I know it's confusing because America was British not so long ago.” 

Harry is certifiable. He’s sitting in Louis’ car fishing half-brown wasabi peas out of a questionable can and popping them in his utterly gorgeous mouth and Louis has only known him for half a day and _maybe,_ maybe, he is fighting a ludicrous attraction to a man who is certifiable. He'll probably serial-kill Louis at the next truck stop, right after he gets Louis to buy him some fresh horror of a snack food. 

Harry puts his entire forefinger into his mouth, lips around it, cheeks hollowed, and Louis doesn't drive off the road but it's a near thing.

“I want to fit you with a biome enhancer,” Harry says, holding a pea to his eyeball and scrutinizing it. 

“No, thanks, I'm good,” Louis says. 

“It's very admirable that you're doing so well with only homegrown gut flora,” Harry says, “But honestly, it's a life-changer.” 

Ugh, maybe Harry is one of those off -the-land hippie types, obsessed with things like kombucha and protesting GMOs. It doesn't really go with all the slim jims he's eaten, but Harry is a conundrum. Louis isn't an expert in gut flora but he's read a few of the big papers. A man's bacteria are his kingdom and he isn't about to let Harry do anything to his.

“I'll live,” he says firmly. 

“What is it you people say?” Harry says, “You can lead a scientist to a nano-repair biome kit but you can't make him unpeel his lower intestinal tract and let the organic bots do their thing?”  

“You aren't allowed to talk anymore,” Louis says. “I'm not sure you're allowed in the front anymore. I think you have to ride in the trunk now.” 

Harry merely sticks his tongue out over his peas. Louis mulls over the possibility that Harry is teasing him. The miles vanish behind them like so many dust clouds.

 

***

 

The sun gets lower, as it tends to do. Four _Free Fallin_ ’s later, Louis finally bucks up enough to think he should point out the fact that Harry’s still in his car, and Louis will probably have to stop this car at some point and get a bed. Or maybe he’ll just find a likely looking hillock of sand and bury his face in it. 

Nah, his neck would kill him in the morning. Microscope neck, gets him every time.

He doesn't want Harry to leave, is the thing. Harry fits so well in the passenger side of his car, where no one has sat for such a long time. A waste of resources, really. They're in the middle of the desert and cracked dirt pools out around them in every direction and Harry needs somewhere to sleep as much as Louis does, doesn't he?

Louis clears his throat. 

“Do you want,” Louis starts, and trails off. Harry’s been suspiciously quiet with his head rested against the passenger window and he hasn’t eaten anything ghastly in a while, so Louis thinks he’s been napping. 

"Yep, probably," Harry says, without looking over. Louis sneaks a look at him. Harry's got his eyes closed, and there's a tender little curling smile on his face. It's a new smile, Louis notes, different from the giant grin that Harry had sported when he'd first jumped on Louis at the gas station and that he'd also given a particular cactus at one of the gas stations (why? Louis had no idea. It looked identical to any other cactus, but Harry had hopped out of the car and made a beeline for it, grinning the whole time. He started chatting at it while Louis got lunch, to give the two of them privacy).

"Uh," Louis says, "Right. Uh, did you have a, a direction in mind yet, or?" 

"Every direction is right in the multiverse," Harry murmurs. 

Louis has been driving with one hand slung lazily over the bottom of the steering wheel for a while, and the other hung over his lap. He feels a whim and he acts on it, which is a major triumph, to be honest: he flicks Harry right in the middle of his long, sprawled-out leg. 

"Ooh," Harry chirps, pulling himself up to make a face at Louis. "Was that rude? Are you trying to get me to read your mind and give you an answer so you don't have to say what you really mean?" 

Louis gapes at the road. People only gain the right to say things like _that_ to Louis after six or nine months of careful study. At least, that’s what he assumes, given his experience with past relationships. The road remains a ribbon of indifference. 

"Life isn't a game every single moment. I'm gonna get a motel room, what, what are you gonna do? What would you like to, would you like to,” Louis says, broken and halting and terribly awkward. 

Harry grins at him. He steeples his fingers together and rubs his long nose against the pad at the base of his thumb. It's catlike and, for a flashing moment, a little feral. 

"It's still interesting, isn't it?" Harry asks. 

There’s a moment long enough for Louis to not say _no._

“I’ve still got government scientists I could call,” he says, warningly. 

“Oh no, anything but that,” Harry says, drawling. Apparently he’s hilarious when he’s just woken up and groggy. He pokes Louis on the side of his thigh and Louis jumps, jolting the car over the median. 

 

***

 

The Mesa Tortilla Flatts Motel and Day Spa is not located in Mesa Tortilla Flatts and does not have a spa. There definitely could be a spa, the clerk at the lobby desk assures them. It’s just that it’s an _emergent_ spa. It’s more the _concept_ of a spa, which could be reified at any moment out of two white folding chairs and a bucket of hot water, should the weary travelers desire massages, pedicures, or other balms after the hot, sandy, dry day. 

Louis declines, and rapidly, since Harry looks dreadfully close to intrigued. 

They acquire a room and on the way up to it, Louis notices that Harry has stopped halfway down the tiny dark hallway at a door marked DO NOT ENTER — ROOF.  

“Harry,” Louis hisses, “It’s written right on the door.” 

“But I want to,” Harry says. 

“Don’t you dare,” Louis says, stomping back down the hallway, like he can glare Harry down. Harry is looking wistfully at the door. The door is a heavy red metal affair with rust marks around the handle, like it’s usually chained up. It is absolutely the kind of door that leads to serial killing and a writeup about _tragic tourists’ death_ on the front page of the Mesa Tortilla Flatts community newsletter. _We gave them a traditional Mesa Tortilla Flatts funeral by dumping them into the canyon, since we couldn’t figure out who either of them were._

“What could happen?” Harry asks. He sounds genuinely curious rather than mocking. Louis shifts from foot to foot and tries to think through it logically because Harry makes everything weirdly sincere, like he’s a combination of a very strange baby who needs to be looked after and an adult man who makes Louis conscious of the way sweat has gathered in the fold of his elbows.  

“Well, they could call the cops, cancel our motel room, throw us out, then we’d have to sleep in my car,” Louis says, valiantly keeping the murder question out of his mouth. He didn’t want to give _Harry_ ideas, either. Rock and a hard place, this whole thing. Why was Louis out here having a road trip? He was losing his mind.  

Harry clasps his hands together. “How lovely,” he says, “I think it’s so cute how you travel with a small house in case any of the large night houses don’t work out. What a very lovely planet you make this, sometimes.” 

Louis has never known someone who could so deftly turn his worst case thoughts into something _lovely._

Louis bites his upper lip and pinches his eyebrows together and huffs, all at the same time. Unexpectedly, Harry leans in close and wraps him in a hug. Louis is startled, because they haven’t broken the touch barrier before, but everything feels a little more intimate and natural since they slipped into being real road trip companions, and they’re squeezed so close together by this narrow hallway anyway. He drops his bag on the floor in his surprise. 

“Come on, onto the roof, don’t you want to get closer to the stars?” Harry asks. _Now_ there’s a teasing turn under his voice. Harry doesn’t hug shyly and he’s a bit taller, so Louis has his face turned into the crook of Harry’s shoulder and armpit. Harry smells and feels comforting, if road-gritty. Louis wants very much to make him happy, in a sudden jolt, and he pats Harry’s back awkwardly. 

“My car’s a shitty place to sleep,” Louis grumbles, following him up the rickety stairs. They leave the bags in the hallway. There’s not a living soul in the Mesa Tortilla Flatts Motel and Day Spa besides the two of them, since the clerk went home with a face of great relief as soon as he handed over their key.

Harry hums a scrap that sounds like Tom Petty, and Louis stumbles quite intentionally when he comes onto the roof, sending Harry a few dangerous steps forward.

“Whoops,” Louis grins. Harry whirls around and apparently the touch barrier is _well_ and truly broken, because he grabs Louis by the wrist and the hip and spins both of them down onto the ground. 

“Fuck!” Louis yells. Harry puts a hand over his mouth.  

“Shh, the cops,” he says in an exaggerated stage whisper. His eyes glint with mischief. Thank the years of inhibiting his own desires, Louis _just_ barely stops himself from licking Harry's fingers.

If Louis were to imagine the night sky he would just imagine uniform white pinpricks, like the old screen saver. The real desert sky is from another universe; there are _galaxies_ here, swirling distal points of light that dance across the color spectrum. There’s a sense of space between them, big and small objects, clusters of stars that seem far and close. He knows it’s probably atmospheric distortion and the weakness of his own mammalian eyesight, built more for scanning for predators over long distance than for space, but it makes him feel giddy. Like a gap has opened up between his stomach and his pelvis, like he's on a ceiling looking down and he might sink into the sky. 

It’s so gorgeous he has to distract himself from it. Harry’s been uncharacteristically quiet, and Louis would rather hear Harry than the sound of his own thoughts, naked against the bigness of this universe that he sometimes forgets he even belongs to. 

“Why are you hitchhiking?” Louis asks. 

“Me?” Harry asks. Louis rolls his eyes so fast that he makes an illusory meteor shower on his perception. 

“No the cacti, idiot,” he says with a smile in it. If Harry can break the touch barrier, Louis can break the teasing barrier. He’s right because Harry giggles, a delighted sound. 

“They do have their branches lifted all the time,” Harry says dreamily. “Why do you suppose they’re always trying to wave at us? Should we wave back?”  

Louis crosses and uncrosses his ankles, feels the grit trapped between his socks and his shoes. It’ll be heaven to have a shower no matter how crappy the shower. Road trips might strip away your usual creature comforts but correspondingly they make simple domestic things feel like luxury. 

“Humans are the most boring, worst species on this planet, if you were really visiting from space, you should’ve just like, landed in Antarctica and hung with the penguins,” Louis says, putting his hands underneath his head and feeling the pressure of his skull against his knuckles. He wants rather badly to ask, _why are you traveling with me,_ but it raises too many questions that could be turned back on Louis himself. 

“You put _paint_ on your useless vestigial _claws,”_ Harry says. 

“What….the fuck….” Louis says, turning his head and getting gravel on his cheek, just to bug his eyes out at Harry. 

“Right, fingernails,” Harry corrects himself, “Little nails on your fingers. Well, little on yours. I love it. Is claws a rude thing to call them? We’ve got them too. A ton of bipedals on my planet have got them, and none of us ever thought to make them sparkly. They’re so useless, Lou, and you people _decorate_ them. It’s the best thing I’ve ever seen.”  

It’s madness. Louis has spent three days alone choking on dust, and then a day getting his head filled up with Harry’s incongruous joy. It’s a clashing contrast that makes him a little dizzy, makes him think he doesn’t know how to feel. He’s glad he’s still lying down. 

“How do you do that? No, really, like, forget the alien bit, how do you honestly, and really, enjoy so many normal things? Because I know you’re joking but like, I also know you’re not joking about this, this, this _enthusiasm,_ ” Louis says in a rush. “Do you actually like boring things?” 

“You’re not boring,” Harry says. Louis flushes all the way up to his forehead, and bites his tongue. 

There’s silence. Harry reaches his arms up at the sky. Louis is certain that he’s trying to approximate a cactus. 

“What are you out here for?” Louis asks, softly. Sincerely. Harry just seems so _certain._ If he can at least lie down next to somebody else’s certainty about something, he’ll have a tether in this awfully big world.   

Harry turns his face to the side, mirroring Louis. His eyes reflect stars, stardust, the miasma of galaxies. 

“Same as you,” he says in his low, slow voice, the one that gives Louis the same sense he’d gotten at the very first gas station. Like Harry looked at him the way you looked at a well loved friend. “Just trying to have an experience.” 

Louis turns his face back to the sky. “Still should’ve done penguins. I don’t experience much.” It leaves a bitter taste in his mouth.

“Why are you out here? What happened?” Harry asks.  

“Nothing,” Louis says. It’s true. Nothing bad happened, _really_. Louis has given it considerable thought in the days alone and he keeps coming back to the feeling that it was just a lot of small misdirections, over a very long period of time, that ended up with him out here alone and wandering.

“What are you looking for?” Harry asks quietly. He’s lying very close to Louis on the roof which is good because the temperature has dropped startlingly fast, desert air venting heat and transmuting to a chill black. Louis shivers, moves his heels and crunches gravel under them. It’s sort of interesting to let the cold wash over him after the dizzying heat of so many hours in the sun.  

“Nothing bad happened, it was more, something good happened,” Louis says. 

“Yeah?” Harry asks. “That’s good. That’s great, Louis.” 

Louis sighs again. He rubs the heels of his hands into his eyes, creates stars of fatigue in place of the real ones. It’s time for bed. Another day, no answers, but at least there’s sleep.  

“Something good happened and I didn’t even care,” Louis says, keeping his eyes closed. “I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t know why I’m out here at all. I worked forever to make this thing happen and then it did and, I have no idea where I’m going, now.” 

“Me neither,” Harry says. “I mostly just was looking for someone to travel with. I didn’t even _know_ about slim jims before today.” 

Louis laughs, a dry, dusty laugh. Harry just sounds so pleased, so gloriously pleased, all the time. “Tomorrow, you gotta try pork rinds,” he says. Harry makes the happiest humming noise, shimmies his shoulders in a lying-down-dance. 

“Are you having a nice experience right now?” Harry asks. It's such a silly question. 

“You know what, I am,” Louis says.  

“Well then,” Harry says, like that’s all that could possibly matter. 

 

*** 

 

The motel room is cramped and done entirely in shades of brown: brown carpet, tan curtains, even the radiator is painted a dull beige. But it’s clean and it doesn’t smell like anything, so Louis is grateful. Nearly the entire space taken up by the two beds. There’s a single thin blanket on each one. Louis sighs when he sees it, because he knows himself and he’s going to be cold. 

Louis hears Harry singing Tom Petty in the shower and he throws his toothpaste bottle against the bathroom door. He can hear Harry’s snort-laugh, even through loud shower and clanking pipes.  

Louis’ sleep shirt is the one he always wears, loose and dark green and old, with faded letters down the front:

_my milkshake brings all the boys to the yard_

_and I’m like_

_please stop_

_this isn’t helping my social anxiety_  

It had seemed like a good idea during the five minutes he’d spent packing to run away from his own life. He has so few things with him now, even though there’s an entire one bedroom condo in the city thirty minutes outside of this desert full of things that Louis can remember buying. He has a couch and a medicine cabinet and a projector and a few board games, he has enough books that movers had complained, he’s somewhere half-way through a University-supplemented mortgage about which he can never remember the details. 

And now he’s just a car and a bag of his very favorite clothes. He imagines his condo for a moment, just long enough to dismiss it, because he doesn’t remember anything that he should’ve packed. Louis puts the shirt on because it’s what he sleeps in and he doesn’t feel like changing a damn thing despite an accidental passenger with strange opinions and hyper-observant eyes. 

Harry comes out without a shirt and with wet curling hair dripping down his shoulders, in grey sleep shorts. There’s a very small hole in the bottom hem of the shorts, like he caught it on something sharp. Louis realizes that he’s only seen Harry through the blurred scrim of desert travel grime. Now, freshly washed, his skin is a warm tan, sloping muscles and long bones. He’s got only the faintest dusting of body hair. 

Louis brushes his teeth harder than they deserve. 

Harry puts a bag of gas station pre-popped popcorn carefully on the bedside table and tells Louis _just in case,_ and Louis is about to make rules about midnight snacks in motel rooms when Harry leans over the tiny gap between their beds and runs his hands on the _all the boys_ part of his shirt. Louis loses his train of thought. Harry raises both of his eyebrows. 

“Bedtime!” Louis yelps, falling backwards onto his mattress, rolling under the sheets, and closing his eyes very tight.  

He’s bone tired so it’s easy to get into bed but it’s not easy to fall asleep once he’s there. True to his fears, Louis shivers. He curls up on his side, tucks his knees as far as they’ll go into his chest. The mattress feels thin and poky, full of springs that might be as old as he is, and it makes noises every time he moves. 

“Hey,” Harry says, six inches from his face. 

Louis’ eyes fly open and he shrieks. 

“Sorry, I should’ve knocked,” Harry says, getting up from his knees where he’d been couching by the side of the bed. He climbs right onto the mattress, picks the edge of the blanket out from underneath Louis’ body, and crawls into it. Louis can only watch in the dim haze of the hotel room, dumbfounded. The only light is from the moon coming through the cheap curtain, and a smoke alarm over the door. 

“What the fuck were you going to knock on?” Louis says, finally. Yep, Harry has — Harry’s just crawled right into his bed. Harry, who isn’t wearing a shirt at all, who’s as hot as a furnace, who is bare skin and tallness, rounded shoulders and too much jaw, and a giant grin glowing a little bit creepily off the light from the window. Harry has crawled into his bed and Louis has already shrieked once but he could probably find it in his heart to conjure up another. 

“You tell me, what’s your door, Lou? You’re cold,” Harry whispers. He fluffs the pillow and arranges it underneath his head, wriggles himself into the mattress to a violent cacophony of squeaky springs. 

The bed is old and weak and Harry is heavier than Louis and it makes Louis’ entire body sink right into the middle of the mattress. Into Harry. 

Harry wraps an arm between Louis’ neck and the bed. It fits well. He puts the other hand carefully high up on the side of Louis’ waist, big and warm and unmoving. It’s comforting and gentle and Louis knows both that he could shove Harry back to his own bed if he wanted to, and that he very much doesn’t want to.

The shivers have died a pitiful death under Louis’ skin, to be replaced with many other terrible feelings. Harry has stuck one foot out from the side of the sheet, probably for temperature regulation. He smells like the Mesa Tortilla Flatts Motel and Day Spa signature shampoo, which is Yucca Flavor. 

Louis is a small ball of petrification, but he’s also warm. And his body is unwinding into that, like a small plant after a cloudy winter, unfurling into the sun. So Louis let himself feel sneakily delighted, under the parts of himself that are still considering shrieking. 

“Go to _sleep,_ scientist Louis,” Harry says. “All the experiences will still be here.” 

 

*** 

 

Breakfast in the Mesa Flatts Tortilla Motel and Day Spa is served _al fresco_ on the patio, which is apparently the proper name for the strip of sidewalk abutting the cracked pavement parking lot. There’s a taped-up paper sign that says _this way to brekfaast_ halfway down the bottom-floor hallway and it’s so old that the paper has gone yellow and curled up around the tape. Louis spends five minutes thinking about tearing it down to put up a correct one, but he can’t summon the brainpower because it’s fucking five-forty in the morning and Harry’s dragged him out of bed. The bed that they were definitely still in together. Breakfast starts at five-thirty in the morning, probably because any later in the day would mean that the food would spoil under a ferocious sun. 

Right now it’s dark in the parking lot, just the faint and uncanny ambient light of pre-dawn, so Louis supposes they’re safe from food poisoning, if not from a cougar attack. 

“At least I’ll get to lie down again if a lion kills me,” Louis says, barely audible through his morning throat, because he was warm and cozy and Harry’s arms had been tangled around him and now he’s decidedly _not,_ he’s standing in front of a plastic picnic table with a thin paper tablecloth that looks like it has scorpions printed on it. Hopefully not _actual scorpions._ He can’t tell, because it’s still so dark, which means they should be in bed _._

“Aw. I didn’t know you all still had to worry about big mammals past your industrial era. I’d save you from a lion, lots of protective tech where I’m from, not that there are any lions here,” Harry says, bumping Louis with his hip as he goes back to the breakfast buffet to pile cornflakes onto a raw bagel. Harry is too enthusiastic about this breakfast. Harry is too enthusiastic about mornings. Louis shakes his head and trails after him. There’s nobody out here but them, not even staff. Maybe the breakfast table has been waiting all night.  

“There could be mountain lions,” Louis says, even though he can look past the parking lot and see for about thirty-seven miles, probably, so there aren’t exactly nearby mountains. But somewhere in this state there are mountains. 

“Would love to talk to a lion,” Harry says, mouth full of the spare slim jim that he brought in the pocket of his sleep shorts for the long and arduous journey down to the buffet. At least he brushed his teeth this morning. 

It’s a lot, sitting in a cold chair in the cold air and feeling stupid after a night spent feeling warm and soft together even on scratchy polyblend sheets, after a morning where Louis eased into waking and realized he was grabbing Harry around the shoulders, face pressed unselfconsciously into Harry’s back. 

“I’m still cold,” Louis notes to get off that train of thought and back into the moment, because _five-forty in the morning_. Harry pats his lap, spilling cornflakes. 

“Ugh, not with the morning breath you’re cooking up,” Louis says.  

Harry winks at him, and starts slicing a banana into a chipped mug of black coffee. Louis looks away, half in disgust and half in a prickling, excited embarrassment. Harry has tumbled him right out of the dreamlike daze he’d been traveling through, but Louis has no idea what the rules are in _this_ dream. 

“If you're an _alien,”_ Louis grouses, stabbing a melon sliver on a bent fork, “Should you be flirting with humans? Isn't that gonna create some anatomical difficulties?”  

Harry hums. “A common concern,” he says owlishly. Louis gives him a look.

“Ok not that common,” Harry amends. “But you don't need to worry. It’s a very long story that I should tell you gradually, maybe not now, but, we've got nearly identical genetic codes.” 

Louis bites gingerly into the melon. It’s ripe and fresh. It breaks over his tongue with a deliciousness that shocks him. He’d been expecting limp cardboard. Over the horizon, there was a shimmering glow and somewhere beneath it, there will be the sun. 

“Handy,” Louis says, chewing. 

“Enough diversity to make it interesting, but flirtation-safe! Your species has a longer, better history than you know,” Harry says.

Louis blinks at him over fruit. Harry's gone through two entire waffles, picking them apart and stuffing them into his mouth and then eating jam separately, on its own spoon. Louis is a little concerned that if Harry doesn't eat a vegetable within twenty-four hours something terrible will happen to his body, genetic diversity or no. 

Harry's in a loose white tank top that looks like it belonged to someone much bigger, and thick green canvas shorts that come down too far. They’ve got a weird pattern on them, a repeating number stamped in black, almost military. Harry looks good regardless. He gazes raptly out into the crumbling parking lot of the Mesa Tortilla Flatts Motel like it’s an inspiring vista. Louis watches his eyes track a house sparrow, and the floating dead remnant of something that used to be a plant, like they’re wonders to behold.

Louis watches Harry watch the universe and comes to grip with the fact that he’s got a massive crush on the weirdest stranger he’s ever met. And that it's here, in an ugly parking lot in a barren place with nothing figured out, that he feels content.

He eats a lot more melon. 

 

***

 

They start driving in the same direction as yesterday until there’s a sunrise, and Louis stops the car without Harry even saying anything. They stumble out of the car and walk far from the road, drawn by the cascading colors, dirt crunching under their feet. Louis even feels the faintest traces of rare desert dew. Must be quite valuable to the mice, that, he hopes it isn’t catching too much in his beat-up shoes. 

The light spreads out over everything. Louis can feel it on the ridge of his cheekbones. He turns around to see his shadow, stretched long behind him. It’s coming over some mountains far in the distance—so there _are_ mountains here, possibly lions, but what would they eat, mice? He’d ask Harry but he can’t even really catch his breath. It’s so gorgeous, sunrise. It’s like paint cans upended at the edge of a tilted table, running down to reach them.  

It makes something happen to the way that Louis can see the world because everything that should be long familiar looks different now, flipped on its head, like a mirror-image that had been following them the whole time without his realizing. 

For example, the cacti used to look like undifferentiated spectres, just vague columns. Now Louis blinks and there are a million kinds: cacti with spreading, sheltering arms and thick barrel tissue trunks, cacti with wide palms and short needles, thin and fat, dry and succulent, and so many colors. There are purples and blues and faded browns, there’s an orange tone to the light and in its shadows there’s _green._

Everywhere, green. Edged around the fine base of a cactus needle, underneath the harsh exterior of the brush, growing and living. Louis can almost imagine their cells, strung together like jewels and fat with light. Out here is a whole ecosystem: owls and foxes and the furry things that Harry loves, tiny mice that wrest water from the world through sheer force of will. So many animals and plans that are small and delicate and strong despite it, not just surviving, but making a home here. 

Louis finds that he has tears in his eyes. 

“Sunrise in the desert is nice,” he says, stupidly. Harry nods.

“Love your little sun,” Harry says, looking at Louis, though. 

“That's what I did,” Louis says.

“Loved your sun?” Harry asks, genuinely. Maybe aliens from planet Harry can fall in love with and marry astronomical objects. Louis would just bet they can. Planet Harry is a free love travesty, a hippie junk food orgy that melts you with charisma even when it needs another shower. 

“I was a biologist, I worked with plants,” Louis says. He shouldn't be using the past tense. He's still got a lab, more than ever these days. He's miles away from it but it's still back there. 

“Yeah?” Harry asks. Louis nods.  

“Well, I mean, I worked with cells that came from plants,” he corrects with a little laugh, because it’s not like—it’s not like you even remember, sometimes, where all the tiny broken pieces come from. It’s the only way to figure things out but it is a kind of breaking. It’s properly bright now, air rising to heat, the day getting stronger, warmer, closer. 

“There are these plants that grow nearly in the dark, you know? Tropical plants and such, in the rainforest, too small to get much sun. They're really efficient at the sun they get,” Louis says. 

“Mm,” Harry says, prompting. Louis rubs his palm against the dirt and it comes away red.

“So they’ve got this process that takes advantage, different cells. I thought we could engineer a way to make other plants equally efficient with photosynthesis. It would be huge, if we could do that. Better crops, you know? Help us figure out things like, like how do we deal with climate change around agriculture. And, and I did. Last year. I’d been working on it my whole career, and we finally engineered a different kind of photosynthesis, into the cellular structure of new plants. It’s a good step, anyway, it’s something.”  

“That’s really something,” Harry says. “You did that? That’s amazing, Lou.” 

Louis nods. He shoves his hands into his pockets, because the sun is rising and it’s glorious bands of light but it’s still cold before the desert catches up to itself. “It is, it was.” 

There’s a bird circling far away, too far away for him to tell what it is. Out here its prey might be the mice and other small mammals, and they blend in so well with the landscape that the birds out here have learned to see movement more than color. Life survives out here when it’s good at pretending to be death. 

“It was a big deal, there was a Nature paper, there was everything, I’d finally done it, you know?” Louis says. It was _the whole point._

“Good of the planet to acknowledge your contribution,” Harry said. Louis feels a wild loosening in his chest and it comes out in a laugh that’s just over the edge of sanity. Harry looks very carefully concerned. Fuck that, it’s tumbling down the mesa edge, it’s escaped from him entirely. How did he even _get_ here? He’d been dedicated his whole entire life. He’d spent his whole entire life looking at cells in a dark room and now he _didn’t even care._  

“And now you’re here,” Harry says. 

“Now, I’m here,” Louis says. Going somewhere. Going nowhere.

The paper had published. He’d gotten it in an email and—and it had only been pixels on a screen, no one to call on the phone about it. Louis had finally done the thing he’d always wanted to do for the world, but the world can’t talk back. 

It had been a tuesday afternoon. Louis had just walked out of the lab and into his car and he’d driven down the interstate and he’d thought, _why am I here?_  

“I’m just so lonely all the time,” Louis says. 

The bird, high and far away in the sky, swoops out of its glide and moves towards the plain. Something, somewhere, has moved. 

Harry doesn't make a face or withdraw or say something stupid. He puts his hand out and touches Louis’ forearm. It’s the lightest touch, just a scrape of his knuckles back and forth, a tentative caress. Louis can feel the catch of the dry edges on Harry’s fingertips, the rub through the hairs on his arm. It’s a touch that’s barely there at all but it’s so sweet he has to close his eyes, like the surprising, bubblegum-bright taste of a prickly pear. The sun shines through his eyelids, red veins and above them, an endless sky. 

“Lou. No one is ever really alone in the multiverse,” Harry says. 

 

***

 

When they get back to the car, Louis turns the radio up loud and Harry doesn’t comment on it, for once, like he senses that Louis needs to recover from the unusual and quite frankly offensive experience of being emotionally honest.  

It’s not Tom Petty, but it has a similar chord progression. Harry digs around in his backpack and Louis feels a small licking flame on the inside of his ribcage as Harry’s tank falls easily open, shows honey-tan skin and armpit hair and red dirt marks that almost look like bruises. The dirt gets everywhere first thing in the morning, you just have to accept it. 

Harry pulls out a pack of slim jims.  

“Are you _serious,”_ Louis says. 

“Emergency rations,” Harry says, biting the entire top of the package off with his teeth. And really, that can’t be natural. Louis watches his teeth flash in and out of view as he chews slim jims with an unwarranted amount of gusto, but they look normal. 

“Oh my god, petrified wood,” Harry shrieks at a road sign, ten minutes and two packs of slim jims later. 

“Are you a sixty year old?” Louis asks. Harry laughs. His cheeks are unfair, that wicked dimple and the wide-set eyes.

“No,” he says. 

Louis snorts and reaches over to turn the radio up, blasting the music. He has to admit it has a great groove to it.

“At least not according to this sun,” Harry says, smugly.

They spend far too long looking at petrified wood, until Louis drags Harry away from an engaged conversation with something that looks to Louis like a stump but looks to Harry like _somebody who hasn’t had anyone to talk to for a while._

“ _I_ haven’t had _lunch_ for a while,” Louis says, pulling Harry away by the bicep and flushing, his fingers only going halfway around. Harry takes off his hat and plops it on Louis’ head and Louis has to tip his face way back to make eye contact and glare. 

Everything about the day keeps being beautiful. 

They see hawks and owls in the morning. They find a gas station that’s a veritable oasis, great white shining countertops and rows of fresh food. Harry politely eats a salad under Louis’ watchful gaze, and Louis gets a mega-ultra-jumbo size slushie that stains his entire mouth and teeth a bright, artificial red. He needs both hands to lift the cup, which was clearly designed to sustain cross-country truckers who find themselves stranded in the wilderness and need a vat of simple sugars shot straight into their bloodstreams. 

“So pretty,” Harry says, and for that, Louis lets him buy a novelty fruit gushers pack in _mango salsa_ flavor. 

 

*** 

 

They stop at Rhyolite. Louis had no plans for it at all and here he is, pulling off at the exit and thinking _Harry is going to love this_ as if that's a valid reason to change anything. 

Harry really does, though. 

“This. Is. Incredible,” Harry whispers. His head is tipped all the way back, face up to the sky. He twirls. 

Louis can’t tell if Harry is talking about the half-present buildings or the glass bottle in the dust or Last Supper or an insect that he saw fly by or Giant Pink Woman. It's all equally likely. 

“Your species has so much to say,” Harry says.  

Louis, who has his hands on his hips, looks at the kicked gravel and shanty structures, the soft grasses hemming the town. He thinks this place looks like a neighbor who was way too into cowboys and Halloween at the same time, and then won the lottery. 

“We never fucking shut up, do we,” Louis says. “I bet the earth would like a tiny bit of quiet.” 

Instead of looking offended, Harry’s eyes are sympathetic. 

“Quiet in the desert,” he notes. 

Harry gallops around the giant sculptures. Louis follows with a little less abandon, but he still climbs on top of Ghost Rider's bicycle. Harry turns cartwheels around every statue, and then stops to inspect a tumbleweed, pulling it apart in his fingers. 

Louis lies down in the dirt. It's getting all in his hair, and the sky is too bright to look up, so he turns his face to the horizon. From this angle, the canyons and rocks look even bigger, the horizon itself coming out from his line of sight, depth perception all thrown off by the long shadows and the strange sun.  

Harry’s feet crunch on the gravel, a loud announcement of the fact that he’s finally walking back over to Louis, having sucked the entire marrow out of the experience that is Rhyolite. He’s so beautiful in all kinds of light, pulls Louis’ attention and becomes the focal point everywhere, makes a backdrop out of every landscape. Louis has a terrible, awful crush on him.  

Harry stops at Louis' feet. He makes a protective shadow, with room to spare over Louis' head. He's got a tiny chip of red-brown glass that he's rolling between his fingers. Harry holds it up to his eye, looks through it at the town. Then he hands it to Louis, with profound solemnity. 

“For you,” Harry says. He smiles. It might look shy, if shy were a thing that Harry did.

Louis feels comforted, in an impossible way. 

 

*** 

 

"Did you ever celebrate it?" Harry says, rolling through radio stations and static at a pace that’s giving Louis a mild headache.

“What, Harry? Celebrate what?” Louis asks, because what Harry means could be anything, his quarter birthday, the fact that oxygen still works, the color of his eyes. 

“Your science, Louis, the photosynthesis, the miracle. Did you ever stop and like, just celebrate it?”

Louis snorts. “It wasn’t a fucking _miracle,”_ he says. Years and years, not giving up, spending every weekend trying to figure out whether it was equipment or stupid mundane errors in the staining or the humidity in the lab or his _idea_ that was wrong? It wasn’t a miracle, it was just, not giving up. 

“Lou, stop the car,” Harry says, insistently.  

"What," Louis says, "What, no, Harry, there's not even a gas station. There's nothing here. That's, it's already done." 

Harry’s twisted all up in his seatbelt again, although at least he’s wearing it, at Louis’ insistence. He’s got his hat on and a fresh flower that Louis doesn’t recognize. Louis has no idea where he could’ve possibly gotten it.  

"It's not done," Harry insists, "It's not done at all. You didn't _celebrate it."_

Louis stops, pulls off into the rocky side of the road and turns off the car. It’s stupid and crazy but so is everything else, out here, so is having Harry in his passenger seat and so is the fact that he accomplished all of that and then the only thing he could think to do was run away. Louis takes a deep, steadying breath, grips the steering wheel.  

Harry taps the radio meaningfully, so Louis puts the keys back in and turns the engine on. The radio flickers into life and where there was only static a second ago, now there’s music. 

“We have to get out,” Harry says, already tumbling out of the car, already flailing his limbs, “And _celebrate!”_

“This is ridiculous,” Louis says, hot and flustered and uncertain that any part of him is worth this kind of attention. Even here, out in the desert alone. Maybe it’s worse, out here alone. “This is ridiculous.” 

Harry leans back into the car to frown at him, big and dramatic and glowering. Harry frowns so rarely that it makes Louis shut up. 

"Turn it up," Harry says. 

Louis rolls his eyes but he does, unbuckles his seatbelt and gets out. It takes a second for Louis to realize, over the driving beat and the triumphant chords, that it's not _Free Fallin'_ for once. 

“I love this song too, this planet has the best music, _and_ scientists,” Harry says, already shuffling his gigantic feet in the dust, already back to his resplendent happiness. Louis feels his own face start to break into a smile, irresistible to the contagion that is Harry. They’ve scared a cluster of lizards who’d been sunning on a rock near the road. 

"It's fucking Tom Petty again, unbelievable,” Louis says, getting louder, his own voice echoing in this big empty space. _Coming down, is the hardest thing,_ the radio blares. And isn't that the truth.  

"Come on, let your planet appreciate you,“ Harry coaxes, stepping closer, and Louis feels a heat down his shoulders and back that isn't the late afternoon sun at all. He puts his hands up in surrender and starts bouncing, just a little, on the chorus. 

"Louis," Harry says, louder this time, "You did it!" 

“I did it,“ Louis says, not looking at Harry or at the giant open desert, but looking down at his toes. He's worked out some kind of stupid step half-step, negotiating around pebbles. The guitars are repetitive but it's lovely, honestly, like a bolstering familiarity, like the song's giving him the chance over and over and over again. 

“I really did it,” he says, louder this time, and again just for good measure. “I knew we could do it, and nobody believed, and I fucking did it!” 

“With plants!” Harry says, “Plants in the dark!”  

Louis is kicking, now, kicking up dust piles, scattering rocks. The chorus is still blaring, triumphant and unabashed. 

“So much dark, so much stupid dark!” he yells. 

"Louis captured the sun!" Harry whoops. He yells it straight up into the sky, like there’s somebody up there who needs to hear it. 

It startles a giant laugh right out of Louis. He looks up and around and he spreads his arms. It's all sun sun sun and Harry, this shimmering alien world around them both, this familiar old song, and the new things that Louis did. _That Louis did._

"I did it!" Louis yells. He turns into the bright light, cups his hands around his mouth, and yells even louder. "I captured the sun!" 

They’re grinning like madmen, pumping their fists to the kickbeat, and Louis’ heart beats in time with it. It’s joy and nostalgia for all those years, it’s _a thing he did,_ and it’s worth it, for once, worth this recognition and worth this moment. The sun and the desert and the planet can’t say anything, just rocks and light and lizards. But their yells echo back and Louis feels _grateful_ , deep in the spaces that don’t have any words. 

 

***

 

They’ve stopped for gas again. They probably don’t need it, but it’s a good habit at this point. This gas station sits in a hollow between two small hills, sheltered from the wind, and it forms an ecosystem all of its own, mostly oriented around the bucket of dirty water that people use to clean the dusty back windshields of their cars. A losing effort, that. Louis has been watching a long and epic battle play out around the rim of the water bucket between two warring beetle tribes, when he realizes that it’s been fifteen minutes without Harry’s voice saying something ridiculous. 

There were a few cars here when they pulled up, but most people have left. Louis scans the horizon and he doesn’t see Harry anywhere.  

Louis feels frantic, suddenly, shot through with fear. He walks all the way around the building and the gas pumps and sees no one. Where is Harry? Has he decided to leave with somebody else? Has he gotten kidnapped, abducted maybe? Some truck driver with yellow teeth and flat eyes told Harry he had gross food in his cab and Harry was all _sure I love food_ and wandered trustingly out with him and now he was _gone._

Harry is in the snack aisle inside the gas station. Harry is biting into a brand new pack of disgusting slim jims. Louis thinks maybe he sees a crinkle of actual packaging going into Harry's mouth, and he ignores that.

“Hiya,” Harry says, startled. Louis goes straight down the aisle and up on his toes and kisses Harry. 

It’s hot, although maybe that’s the lingering spicy slim jim. It’s soft, the press of Harry's full bottom lip into his. And then it’s heady, when Harry swallows his food and opens his mouth and kisses Louis back, kisses him _deeper,_ licks out with a warm, sweet tongue. Harry tastes amazing. The residual snack food tastes awful.   

“I'm so sorry,” Louis gasps, immediately, as soon as he comes back to air and reality. Harry blinks his big, bright, green eyes. Louis thinks, wildly, that they look more luminous than normal.

“I promise I won't do that again, I'm so sorry, I know you're depending on me for a ride and I just, totally, didn't mean to put you in a bad position, take advantage,” Louis says desperately. “I lost my head. I'm sorry.” 

“You are a foot shorter and twenty pounds lighter than I am,” Harry says, low, slow, a deep voice that keeps doing things to Louis’ insides. It's worse now that Louis wants to kiss him. Now that Louis knows that Louis wants to kiss him. Somehow Harry's arms are around Louis. He smells better than someone eating a constant diet of slim jims could possibly smell. “I'm not disadvantaged.” 

“I’m not _twelve inches_ shorter,” Louis protests. Harry is tracing the shape of Louis’ shoulder blade with the edge of one big hand. Harry is warm, and still close, and his lips are parted. 

“Three inches, I don't know,” Louis says. Harry's strong, he can probably pin Louis up against anything he wants. 

“Plus there's my superior technology,” Harry murmurs.

“Right,” Louis said. How come he was the one who felt lost? He was the one with a car and a place to go. 

“Are you all right?” Harry asks. Louis pulls out of his grip, but he nods, and he smiles, and there’s something there that’s electric and hanging between them all the way back to the car. 

 

*** 

 

The weather changes, rapidly and dramatically. There’s an actual lightning strike in the rearview mirror by the time they pick a new motel. Not so much pick a motel as luckily stumble onto a motel, because it’s already dark blues melting into black around the car, the headlights making two eerie paths on the unlit road. Harry puts his palm over Louis’ thigh to get his attention and says, _there,_ and Louis’ heart stutters so loudly in his throat he worries Harry might hear it. 

The Sunset Beatty Bob Motel has got a neon sign out front that isn’t turned on. There’s some kind of bird’s nest built into the second _B_ and it’s frighteningly large. Still, if you ignore the water stains and the puce-colored carpeting and the way that half of the building seems to be sinking into clay earth, it’s a fine place to stay.  

Since all that Louis can pay attention to are Harry’s footsteps behind him, Harry’s gaze as he fumbles with the key card, Harry’s slight smile as he curses at the keycard and then discovers that he had it upside down, he supposes they’ll manage. 

“I can pretend to get lost again, if it would make you kiss me,” Harry says, as Louis is setting out his toiletries on the sink. Louis starts and knocks a tin of facial moisturizer off the ledge onto the carpet. He turns back and Harry’s there, something gentle in his face. 

“I’d just really like that,” Harry says, “So you don’t have guess. I know you like people to read your mind. Can’t do that, though. Not yet, anyway.” 

Louis is grinning, now, happiness beating a little drumbeat from his toes up to the crown of his head. It’s been a good day. It’s been a really good day. He steps forward and crowds into Harry’s space, lets himself move without thinking. 

“You don’t have to read my mind, but I’d really like that too,” Louis says. He starts to move in even more but Harry stops him. 

“Lou,” Harry says. “There's also the alien thing.” 

“Oh, god,” Louis says. “I suppose your body works different? Should I be worried? Are you gonna dissect me? Do you even have parts, down there? Or only just tentacles. I could work with that, I guess.” 

Harry grins. He has big canines, Louis notices for the first time. The yellow motel light shouldn't be able to make anybody look _better._

“We've got nearly identical genetic codes,” he says, “Remember? Don't be so heliocentric, baby. But it's a matter of full disclosure.” 

“I don't care, I'm ok, I want it, if you want it,” Louis says. He’s burning up. Now that it’s out in the open and he’s learning to say what he wants, it’s like he can’t stop. Harry’s muscles are curves edged in the buzzing streetlight, a Michaelangelo in the middle of a murder motel. Louis feels _alive,_ and somehow that’s new, too _._ He really, really wants this. 

“I won’t dissect you, you’re the scientist,” Harry says. 

Harry steps forward. He walks Louis back up against the flimsy, terrible wall of their flimsy, terrible motel room. He slides a hand under the edge of Louis’ shirt and around the curve of Louis’ shoulder and squeezes. It’s not what Louis expected and it’s made more intimate from that, playful. He smiles up at Harry, puts his hands to Harry’s waist, slow and light. It’s maddening because of how much he wants it, the air feeling charged between them, his fingers just on the edge of trembling.  

“But I’ll take you apart a little, if you want,” Harry says. 

“Yeah,” Louis breathes, like a question, thin and a little more shy than he wants.  

Suddenly Harry’s pushing him against the wall with purpose, pressing in with shoulders and hips, leaning his whole weight into them. Air pushes out of Louis’ lungs, involuntary and loud. Their faces are so close together that Louis can see the mischief in his eyes. Harry leans in close to Louis’ ear. He smells spicy and sweet and smoky at the same time, and his hair is in Louis’ face, and Louis is weak in the knees. 

Harry’s gentle and insistent simultaneously, moving to kiss down the side of Louis’ face, more tender than Louis would have thought for two still-pretty-much-strangers in a strange motel room, moving together in the stale air of a dying day. It’s soft and investigatory. The way it tickles makes Louis’ bare toes dig into the cheap motel carpet, synthetic fiber slip under his feet and all around him the intoxicating way that Harry feels, full of strange energy and strong. 

Harry grabs the barest edge of Louis’ jaw between his teeth in a playful mock-bite and Louis shivers, tucks his fingers under Harry’s chin and guides his face up and over so he can kiss him for real. 

Whatever Harry is--hitchhiker, stranger, gas station snack food aficionado, radio saboteur and amatuer alien conspiracy theorist who makes Louis laugh--he’s also a phenomenal kisser. His mouth is lush, the drag of his lips satisfying and provocative, the push of his tongue dizzying. It doesn’t taste like crap food anymore at all, it tastes sweet, like want and jokes and Harry, silver glitter and small shiny rocks and mysterious road trips, everything totally new and totally familiar. Louis slides into it like he was always meant to be there. 

Harry’s lips meet his with a perfect pressure, long and lingering. He kisses in a way that doesn’t surprise Louis after so many stolen moments of watching Harry in his passenger seat, sun on his features, eyes half-closed and head turned outward. Harry kisses slowly, thoroughly, like he's exploring. His hand is still behind Louis’ shoulder and his fingers are stroking down the pad of muscle, tracing over bone. 

Louis drops one hand to Harry’s front, crawls his fingers up the thin fabric of his shirt and then down to his hips, letting himself have his own exploration. Harry’s strong and curved in the right ways, a narrow frame with slight love handles over the edge of his jeans. Louis wants to bite into his soft sides, lick up his torso.  

Louis leans forward into Harry. They’re catching shortened breaths now, hands bolder, hips close, feeling heated and more urgent, suddenly. Now there's Harry's groin and hip pushing deliberately into Louis’ cock, dragging with a devilish slowness. 

Louis can’t really think straight anymore, Harry all around him, Harry’s long hair falling over their faces. He’s so warm and he makes Louis feel paradoxically small and powerful, because when Louis deepens the kiss with an unexpected slip of tongue and his fingers digging into Harry’s lower back, Harry moans in the back of his closed throat. 

“You make my cells more efficient,” Harry says, brightly. 

Louis groans, a true irritated groan and not a sexual one. Harry’s half-breathless laughing, and Louis back them away from the wall and toward the bed. Harry's still kissing Louis well, it’s hot and good and a little frantic, despite their going backwards and the height difference.

“You’re so weird,” Louis mutters, curling his fingers into Harry’s jeans and giving him a questioning look, and then when Harry grins, popping the button and pulling down the zipper, making sure to drag his finger on the inside. Harry hisses in a breath. Louis can feel heat and heft of his hardening cock and his pulse, through the layers of his boxer. Louis pushes his finger between the jeans and the fabric. Harry’s boxers are bright yellow and they’re printed with tiny, tiny silver spaceships. 

“You’re so weird, you’re so weird, you’re so weird,” Louis says, where other people might say _you’re so hot._ Harry only looks thrilled. He’s gotten his hands down lower on Louis’ back now, caressing into the curve of his ass and toward the heat of his inner thighs, and it’s just lovely. Harry uses his fingernails on the denim, just a tease, and it makes Louis quiver into his hands, gasp up into Harry's mouth.  

“Oh I see,” Harry says, unbuttoning Louis’ jeans with a quick hand and getting them down around his thighs so fast Louis feels dizzy, or maybe he was just already so far gone that everything is this blur of strange light and beautiful boy and the thudding desire in his ears, “Oh, you like things that are _new,_ too.” 

“Shut up, I like _you_ , you complete weirdo,” Louis says. He puts his hand down into Harry’s boxers now and apparently Harry can’t come up with anything even weirder in response because it’s all drowned in sensation. Harry’s cock is thick and hard and lovely, it’s hot in Louis’ hand. He rolls his fingers around the length of it, pulls his forefinger teasingly around the tip of Harry’s cock, coaxes at the damp working through Harry’s boxers.

Harry makes an affronted noise, or maybe just a wanting noise, staggers them back to fall onto the bed, tangled up in each other, needy kisses and bodies pressing closer, hips canting and every friction a good one. There’s a dangerous rattle from the lamp on the bedside table. Louis guesses it can’t possibly be worth more than ten bucks, and he’ll drive all the way to wherever Sunset Beatty Bob buys his lamps to replace it if he has to. But right now he’d let Harry smash up everything inside this tiny motel room, not excluding himself. 

“Come here, hard thinker,” Harry whispers, nudging Louis away just long enough to pull their shirts and jeans off. It’s all skin and nerve endings, so good that Louis feels like there are prickles underneath his skin, like he’s fallen into the unexpected bands of sunlight coming out of a canyon. He grasps for Harry, pulls him so close, curls his face into the negative space made by Harry’s neck and chest and sets aside any pretense of disguising how much he’s feeling, how much he _wants._

Harry rolls over on the bed, presses Louis into it, kisses into the pulse points of his neck and attaches his teeth to the hot skin over his collarbone. He’s stroking over Louis’ thighs and slipping his hands up the back of them, and it’s pulling gasping small noises out of Louis’ throat. He feels like his entire body is falling open for it. Cheap springs creaks underneath them and none of it matters compared to Harry’s tongue invading his mouth, Harry’s hand on his hard cock now, the heady overwhelmingness of _touch_ that Louis has been missing for so, so long. 

“Is this good, is this ok?" Harry asks. Louis should maybe have considered asking that back at him, but he nods frantically and Harry's beaming, so he thinks he's got an answer. He can't quite stay still long enough for Harry to jerk him off, to figure out exactly what they should do, keeps getting pulled back into the orbit of Harry's mouth. Louis decides that he might like kissing Harry's neck best, for the way that Harry moves into it, but then Harry finds his mouth again and that's the best, lips kiss-swollen and still so needy and surprising. 

Harry grips his cock through the fabric until Louis feels _crazy,_ thrusting his hips forward, trying to find the velvet skin through the folds of cloth. 

"Harry, please," he says, a little shivering crack in his voice, and Harry's looking at him all smug narrowed eyes and teasing. Louis gets Harry's lip back between his teeth in a teasing bite and finds an angle that pushes his thigh hard into Harry's cock, and Harry moans back in response and gives, finally, hooks his fingers into Louis' boxers at the same time as Louis slides off Harry's. 

It's lovely, it's so lovely, it’s like the explosion of sunrise over the first mountain ridge, the surprise of skin on skin and everything in Louis' body hurtling him toward _more._

"I wish I had condoms, but," Louis says, and he hadn't really thought that he could get embarrassed in the hot middle of being already naked with somebody but, he goes all the way red. 

Harry just looks terribly endeared. "Biome enhancer," he says meaningfully, still finding a friction with his hips that's driving Louis mad, thrusting little movements between both of them. Louis could probably come like this, just rutting together and kissing and being overwhelmed with it. Louis manages to flick him on the shoulder anyway. 

"You're really beautiful, the prettiest human, Lou," Harry says. Before Louis can really think about it, Harry's shimmied down the bed far enough to get his mouth on Louis--and--and, there's not a lot of room for retorts. There's not a lot of room for self-control either, not with Harry licking an awfully effective stripe down his cock, not with the gentle way that he's still tracing a pattern on Louis' stomach while he does it.  

Louis is supposed to be an expert in things that are alive but he hasn't felt it, not in forever. It's all been grey cement and silent labs for so long, the reduction of his world into bottom lines and cell lines, nothing bigger than the plane beneath a microscope. But he's gone miles and miles from that life, and he likes what he's found. Shivers run under his skin, under Harry's hands, shaking him up into Harry's warm and careful mouth, trembling under Harry's body weight. Harry moves so slow it's almost torture, or it would be, if it weren't perfect. There's a warning clench in the pit of his stomach faster than he would've believed, raw and delicious. 

"Harry," Louis managed to gasp out, because suddenly he wants Harry's face close, wants to bury his own in Harry's neck and make sure it's good for Harry, too. 

"Still here," Harry says, god-damn dimples coming out. Louis pulls him a bit too fiercely by the hair, but Harry comes willingly. Louis gets a hand that's spit-slick from Harry's mouth around both of their cocks, finds a grappling angle made easier by the way that both of them are bucking together, both of them losing any sense of finesse and slowness. 

All in all, it's a very nice experience. 

  

***

 

In the shuddering aftermath of orgasm, Louis feels a unwrought, a little on the unpleasant side of weak, but he breathes in and lets it pass, watches the light on the ceiling. The lamp survived and there’s moonlight coming in from the window and it’s all peaceful, even the cheap sheets underneath them and the thin mattress. He wouldn’t change a fucking thing. 

Louis blinks at Harry through his haze, a face that sometimes looks just a little too handsome to be quite human, his wide eyes and his unguarded, disarming smile.  

“It’s so new,” Louis whispers. They’re tired and sweaty and wrapped up in a secret glow surrounded by this empty motel with all its ugliness, this barren desert with all its life, and Louis wouldn’t be anywhere else. His eyelids are heavy. His body feels flushed and full and seen. 

Harry rolls forward, leans just enough over Louis to make him feel protected, and wanted, and stupid. He presses another long kiss into Louis’ mouth, a bonus kiss, messy and sweet and something in it that seems greedy and possessive. Kissing someone for emphasis after you’ve already wrung them out. 

“What’s new, Lou?” Harry says, pulling away just an inch or two to yawn. He wriggles his heavy thigh between Louis’ legs, sneaks his hand underneath the pillow under their heads. He’s still so close, looks so happy to just be here sharing air and cuddles, far nearer than the usual distant space of an awkward first hookup. It’ll probably be gross in the morning and it really should be gross right now but it only feels intimate, secret and too-close under bare yellow bulbs. Louis traces the curving shape of Harry’s ribs along his side. He should reach back and switch off the lamp because they’re falling asleep together but he doesn’t want to stop looking at Harry, through his eyelashes, trying to memorize the details. 

Louis realizes that there’s _rain_ outside, hitting against the window, rattling the pane. While they were engrossed together the fierce rush of a rare storm descended on the desert. Somewhere just a little too close, there’s a lightning strike. 

Harry strokes Louis’ hair away from his temple, surprisingly tentative for all the ways that Harry is otherwise pressing into his space and laying claim to it. Harry smiles at him. 

“What’s new,” Harry whispers. 

“Not having anywhere to go,” Louis says. He hasn’t managed to turn the lamp off but everything’s going dark anyway.

 

***

 

The Sunset Beatty Bob Motel doesn't serve a breakfast, so when Harry wakes up preternaturally early and forces Louis to be awake too, they find breakfast at the first gas station. It's got surprisingly wonderful cinnamon rolls that are only just out of the oven at six o'clock in the morning, so perhaps Harry can be forgiven for his chipper insistence that the best earth is the early morning earth. Louis has a mouthful of thick white frosting and gooey dough. He looks across the small metal table outside the gas station, wondering what Harry is thinking, when Harry leans across the table and kisses him. They get icing everywhere, including Louis' hair and Harry's blue and pink handkerchief, and it's glorious. 

Louis links hands with Harry as they stand waiting for the car to fill up with gas, curving his fingers into the bend of Harry's first knuckles. They're comfortably quiet and deliciously full of sugar. Harry keeps pressing casual kisses into strange parts of Louis, onto his ear and the back of his shoulder and his pinkie fingers, and it makes Louis feel like the most valuable cactus in the desert. Louis feels like he's spinning, maybe, with the rotation of the earth, with the rotation of the stars. He doesn't know what he's doing or what comes after this road trip or even what comes _next_ in this road trip and he can’t even worry. 

They drive for a while in the most comfortable, least alone silence that Louis can remember. They don't have the radio on this time, just watching the sunbeams brighten and thicken over the dash of the car, watching the earth go from orange to tan to white around them. 

It's out of this safe stillness that everything changes. 

Louis looks over at Harry to make a face at him and looks back at the road. There’s a flurry of movement across it. It's something small and frantic, an animal shape stark against pavement. It’s a desert jackrabbit, something with black and otherworldly ears, Harry would know but there’s no time to ask. For an instant everything is frozen.  

There's a universe where this is an inevitability: Louis and Harry whirl forward in their metal box and they smash this small living thing into a pulp, life ended in an accident, just like it began on this planet.

But in this universe, what happens is: Louis startles and wrenches the steering wheel. That would've been fine except that there was rain last night for the first time in months. The rain has left an oil slick on the left side of the road and the tires have built up a thick layering of dust and grime that make them prone to slipping. The car skids, far further than Louis meant it to, and the jackrabbit jolts away, safe to its hostile home. 

It still would’ve been fine except that it happens at the one place it shouldn’t. The road has been flat for a hundred miles and it’s flat for another hundred in front of them but _here,_ the road has risen in a steep incline along the edge of a rare canyon. They’re only here because Louis picked it on a whim, flipped through a pamphlet in the dank motel lobby and thought Harry might like to see the way low desert climbed into a tabletop mountain of layered rock. Thought they could stand on the precipice with their toes over the edge and the car parked securely on pavement. There’s road and then there’s dirt and then there’s absolutely nothing underneath the car tires, spinning uselessly. 

For someone who’s made a life out of staying carefully on one road, it’s briefly and horribly funny that the end looks like this.  

Louis only has time to realize it's happening, to feel the sick lurch of the car into space, to see an unending sky. 

“I’m sorry,” Louis manages to say. 

“Don’t be,” Harry says. 

Harry spreads his hands wide. Maybe he's panicking, that would make sense. Louis is trying to reach out too, maybe to take his hand, maybe to spend this last millisecond not alone. It's just--it's just that it's not fair, really, not now, not like this, not when there was still so much left to see. 

Louis senses many things at once that his mind can't piece together into anything but chaotic noise: a spreading heat, like the sun is coming underneath the car now, a leveling, like gravity is tearing at them from multiple sides, a sickening distortion in his own body. He's upside down and backwards and his body is _moving through things_ it's all _glowing,_ including Harry. 

 

***

 

When Louis regains consciousness he's on his back at the bottom of the canyon, looking at the sky. He's alive, probably. At least that's the nearest explanation he can come up with because everything seems much the same except that he's outside of the car instead of inside of a twisted pile of metal. The canyon walls are tall and orange and striped with different layers of rock. There's a bird, high up, too far to be recognizable. There's a faint drift of clouds from the previous night's rainstorm.  

Harry's sitting crosslegged on the canyon floor next to Louis' head. He's eating a slim jim, of course, but he looks more nervous than Louis has ever seen him look. 

"Harry," Louis croaks. 

"Hi," Harry says. He holds out half a freshly-bitten slim jim and Louis shakes his head. 

"You're ok," Harry soothes, patting him on the shoulder, letting his hand linger and then pulling it away like he thinks better of it, or he's trying to give Louis some space. Louis knows he's ok. Louis feels great, actually, alive and blinking and blood pumping and everything good and whole. He sits up. 

"Was there something in the cinnamon rolls?" he asks carefully. Now that he's sitting up there's something in his peripheral vision that looks an awful lot like it used to be his car. Now that he's sitting up his mind is coming back online and it's saying, _this doesn't make any sense at all._ The edges of the world aren't as stable as he'd thought they might be.  

Harry slides closer in the dust and makes blinkers of his hands and puts them around Louis' face. He still looks quite nervous. It's adorable. 

"Don't think too hard," Harry says, "Or, try to think slowly? You fainted on me, a little, but it wasn't from the crash, I think you were just shocked."  

"The crash," Louis says, slow and muddled. They were driving and then they weren't driving and they're at the bottom of a canyon and Harry's eyes are _so,_ so green. He's biting his bottom lip, turning it pinker. He's intense and close and his breath smells like chemically-spiced beef sticks. They're at the bottom of the canyon and they're not in the car and Harry _did something._

"I've got something to show you," Harry says, "Ok?" 

Louis nods. Harry pulls his hands back. 

The first thing that Louis sees is his faithful car in a horrible scrap pile. It's wrecked almost beyond recognition, smashed in and beaten against the walls of the canyon, and pieces of it scattered around like the remnants of an impact. It looks like something that fell from space, not just the road. It looks unsurvivable. 

"We were thrown clear," Louis says. 

"No," Harry says.  

"No," Louis agrees, because it's nonsense. He looks back at Harry, and back at the pile of metal, and then finally, _finally_ his brain grudgingly lets him look past his wrecked car to see what sits behind it. 

Louis looks back at Harry. Harry gives him a tiny, self-deprecating shrug. 

It rises halfway to the edge of the canyon, taller than a house, taller than a medium-sized skyscraper, probably. Its sloped lines curve into a dewdrop-elliptical shape, at least from this angle, chrome-silver and reflective. Half of it is a mirror image of the canyon, faded almost into the shadow in a way that makes the metal--if it's metal--look soft, although Louis imagines that might actually be more a disguise than an aesthetic accident. It's humming, just a little. It's glowing, more than a little, and the color that the glow throws off is a familiar green. 

"You were telling the truth," Louis says. 

"Mostly," Harry says. “I’ll tell you the whole truth in the future, though. I promise. If you want there to be a future. I hope you do.” 

He's still close into Louis' space, and Louis still wants to kiss him. Louis is pretty sure that he's the one who's supposed to be terrified, but Harry is watching him like he's waiting for Louis to break his heart. 

“Harry. Has this been the longest, weirdest alien abduction of all time?” Louis asks, slowly and quietly. 

Harry purses his lips and raises his eyebrows. The things he can do with that face. The things he can do with that _mouth._ Louis flushes, and Harry looks a little less worried and a little more gleeful. 

“Yes,” Harry says, hands on his hips. He glances fondly at the spaceship and then fondly at Louis. It's disconcertingly similar. Louis feels _wanted._

“Or, maybe we could think of it like...hitchhiking. You gave me a ride, now here’s mine. Don’t you want to come explore with me, Lou?” 

Louis looks back at the marvelous craft. He supposes the proper word is spaceship or extraterrestrial something or other, some engineering term, maybe, but the only word he can apply is _craft._ It’s elegant. There are a million, bazillion other questions exploding in his brain but for some reason that’s the observation his mind is fixating on: it’s elegant, like somebody made it with love. 

He looks at Harry. Harry looks back, patiently. 

“Everything will be interesting?” Louis says. 

Harry smiles, genuine and promising. “Yes.” 

Louis cares about finding things out, for their own sake. Louis cares about getting to see things. Louis cares, for some wild and unknowable and undoubted reason, about Harry.  

And it would definitely be getting closer to the universe. Or the multiverse.

“Take me wherever you’re going,” he says. 

**Author's Note:**

> [fic post if you like](https://helloamhere.tumblr.com/post/172731225978/alien-roadtrip-16k-by-helloamhere)
> 
>  
> 
> And [a quote gif I made!](https://helloamhere.tumblr.com/post/172897665938/you-would-not-believe-the-difficulty-i-had)
> 
> There are a ton of real scientists doing real photosynthesis work and they're not represented here but I love you. Lots.
> 
> Roadtrip geography is mostly made up without any shame (American desert only takes three days to drive across when you're in an existential timeloop??) but black-tailed jackrabbits are worth looking up because they look like cute aliens and Rhyolite IS a place you could roadtrip through while you figure out what’s missing from your life. OR IS IT.


End file.
